I'm a pharmacologist, freelance science and medical writer, educator, and speaker with a passion for public understanding of science and medicine. I earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology and therapeutics from the University of Florida and a B.S. in toxicology from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. I report on all things pharmaceutical and scientific from the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina.

I don’t know Adams but I do know that working full-time for Forbes requires one to meet a very high bar. For example, many of my readers would know Matt Herper as one of the top pharmaceutical industry journalists in North America. Similarly, Bruce Japsen, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, is one of the best writers on health care in the US.

So I was extremely surprised and, frankly, disappointed that Adams would write such a misguided article, based apparently on a report from CareerCast.com and her perception of university faculty through one tenured professor she knows. Yesterday, Adams issued a mea culpa within the same post — and I give her credit for keeping the original post up. As of this writing her post has has 123,000 pages views and 351 comments (115 in the last 24 hr), primarily objections from faculty members on the front lines at US universities.

I don’t want to make the same mistake of a small sample size but I feel that my primarily academic biomedical research and teaching career (since 1992) gives me some latitude to make a few generalizations. I’ve worked at a state university’s top 25 academic medical center and pharmacy school, an elite private research university, a teaching-intensive, historically-Black college/university in a large state university system, and am now a half-time writing professor (in a department of English) at a state land-grant university. I also work half-time as a science communications director for a state natural sciences museum. The emphasis on teaching vs. research at each institution has varied. I’ve earned tenure twice, once in the traditional fashion at the 7th year of an assistant professorship and again at appointment as a professor and department chair.

With the caveats of my own experiences and those of colleagues with whom I’ve worked or otherwise interacted around the world, here are my top 10 reasons that being a university professor is stressful:

1. Performance, advancement, and almost every scholarly metric is dependent on anonymous peer-review

Write a grant application, get three anonymous reviewer critiques. Submit research results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, get anonymous reviewer critiques. Submit your tenure portfolio or post-tenure portfolio to a college promotion and tenure committee, get anonymous reviews. While one may know the general composition of grant review and promotion and tenure committees, you don’t know precisely who is gunning for you. Anonymity is sometimes useful but more often allows petty vendettas to occur that are independent of the work at hand.

Research universities, medical schools in particular, are highly-dependent on federal research funding to pay faculty salaries. So, you have to raise anywhere from a quarter to 100% of your salary. Some research universities typically hire more faculty than they can afford with the assumption that research project grants will generally cover a relatively stable percentage of faculty salaries. The National Institutes of Health has recently announced that it’s expected universities to step up over the next 20 years.

3. Faculty must provide salary and university benefits for research staff

If you’re in a tenured or tenure-track position, your salary will likely be covered for at least nine months (but everyone works 12 months regardless because you’re competing for research funds against others who will work 12 months even if they only have a nine-month salary).

However, if you have research staff, fellows, editorial assistants, etc., you have to pay for these folks off your research grants. That’s usually 100% of not only their salary but benefits as well. Research grant funds technically come to the university so salary and benefits are in effect paid by the university. But if you lose your grant, you lose your laboratory personnel – no backstop, no six-month severance. It’s here today, gone tomorrow. And all the investment, expertise, and institutional lab memory goes away. If you lose your personnel, it becomes more difficult for you to score subsequent funding. That then puts you in a position, even if you have tenure, of having lab space taken away and having more teaching and administrative committee work piled on you, making it even more difficult to score subsequent funding.

4. Faculty must provide universities with the teat of indirect grant costs

The pressure for faculty to obtain research funding is not just self-motivated. The common complaint among faculty is that if one is lucky to score a grant in this funding environment, the first thing a supervisor will ask is when they’re submitting the next one. Why? Because universities garner an additional 40-80% on top of what your laboratory requests for a project. Yes, if I get a grant for $200,000 per year, the university gets $80,000-$160,000 that I don’t see.

These funds are obviously necessary to cover indirect costs such as utilities, facilities and maintenance, and safety and security functions. But these funds are often squirreled away for other special projects of high-ranking administrators. At some universities, the funds are managed well — to provide recruitment packages for new tenure-track faculty. At other universities, the distribution of indirect cost recovery is questionable. More central functions that should be covered by indirect costs are now being billed directly to laboratories even though their grants provide the university with substantial indirect costs.

You can never have enough grants at most biomedical research universities.

5. Success rates for biomedical and science & technology grant funding is at an all-time low

Currently, grant funding rates across the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation are at their lowest percentages in history (see the dotted line on the figure at this DrugMonkey post). At the NIH, many institutes are funding at the 11th percentile (and I’ve seen some in single-digit percentiles). One is permitted a total of total of two submissions such that overall funding rates can sometimes approach 20%. Writing each grant generally takes four to six weeks but you don’t learn the grant scoring for three months, the actual funding possibility until six months (or longer if Congress is dragging their feet), and see the actual funding at nine to 12 months. In many cases, it can be over two years (or never) between conceiving an idea and seeing research support.

The result is that this is the first time in 20 years that I’ve seen more than three people I know giving up their laboratories and moving on to 100% teaching positions or other careers entirely. That’s okay from the standpoint of personal satisfaction but the federal medical research enterprise has made tremendous investments in individuals. It’s a terrible waste to see well-trained scientists leaving the academy.

The system also penalizes women for being the gender that gives birth to our future citizens. The “tenure clock” normally doesn’t get delayed if one has a child and takes maternity leave. Some granting agencies are now allowing applicants to note that they may have had a break in productivity because of family or health issues. But, by and large, women are not treated kindly by the system.

And just in case you think 80% of science professors are complaining, consider this: one of the 2012 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry lost his funding from a private research institute a few years ago. His work could not move forward because he had to let some research staff go. Fortunately, his wife is a scientist and has been working with him through thick and thin. He lives in a high-cost market and had to pick up side work (he was fortunately a physician) to be able to make his mortgage. Now he has a Nobel Prize. But most of us don’t.

6. Many US universities operate under a customer service model while accepting students unprepared for college-level coursework

“The customer is always right,” didn’t always apply to universities. Many places still require that students assume substantial personal responsibility for success. But I’ve seen some state universities kowtowing to student demands that undermine academic integrity. We’re even seeing helicopter parents contacting professors directly about their kids’ grades (disclosure is against federal law) and complaining to department chair and deans. The default reaction from administration is that the professor is at fault. Professors are also penalized if their course grades have too high of a percentage of D’s and F’s. At the same time, some of the same universities are allowing students to enroll in college with SAT scores of 800 or below — for combined math and verbal components. Even among populations that might not have the luxury of taking standardized test prep scores, that doesn’t account for the 300 or so more points that may of us establish as the minimum (I scored an 1120, by the way, so I was no genius). Too many professors are being expected to make up for the deficiencies of public high school education.

7. Increasingly reliance on adjunct teaching faculty

For teaching-intensive institutions, a new tactic to cut costs is to hire temporary faculty to teach courses. Rather than paying a professor $75,000 plus benefits, you can now hire from the ranks of unemployed scientists a no-benefits PhD at $3,000-$4,500 per 3 credit hour class per semester. I have seen some tenure-track faculty actually be threatened by their supervisors with being replaced by such adjunct faculty if they can’t score grant funding. The abuse of adjunct faculty by US universities is a travesty.

8. The public and some university administrators underestimate teaching effort

If I teach a 3 credit hour class, it may appear that I’m only working 3 hours/week. However, developing and updating course material takes time, especially in rapidly-changing fields like mine (pharmacology). At one of my former universities, we had a defined formula that I quite liked and agreed with: you get eight hours of time for each one hour of lecture time if it’s brand-new material and four hours of time for each one hour of lecture given if it’s an existing course. Those numbers are about right in my experience.

You also have student office hours of four to eight hours per week, time grading assignments (much more time-consuming now that I’ve become a writing professor) and exams, and professional development time where one might attend a seminar or off-campus conference to learn about your field of study. So, a 3 credit hour class can easily take 15-20 hours/week. Depending on the school, a full-load might be two or four classes. So, it’s pretty easy to get to 30-40 hours/week with just two classes. The average prof works about 60 hours/week so, uh, yeah, that’s a 50% effort.

9. Administrators underestimate online teaching effort

If you’re already teaching the class, it’ll be nothing to throw it up online, right? Universities are increasingly moving classes to online offerings, a genuinely useful approach for students working full-time. Unfortunately, some universities are simply stressing online classes because it brings in revenue without significantly increasing infrastructure costs. Professors are usually given less credit for online courses than for those in-person. Most professors I know who teach online classes say that much more effort is required for online classes.

10. Administrators overestimate the need for administrators

I know that accreditation guidelines, safety, development, grants and research compliance, and other administrative issues require dedicated administrative personnel. Jobs that used to be done by one person now often seems to require two or three and we’re seeing the number of assistant associate vice deans for whatever increasing over the last five to seven years. I used to be part administrator — I’d get additional salary for that, but not for increased teaching or university service — so I guess that I used to be part of the problem.

Oh, and why not 11:

11. “Tenure” is no longer tenure

Tenure is a hot-button item particularly for critics of state universities. Indeed, tenure had its purpose in allowing academic freedom of thought and opinion without institutional retaliation. Some people think it’s no longer necessary. But it is, particularly given the substantial dependence of universities on salary support for faculty. Most universities have also instituted more stringent post-tenure review processes, generally about every five years. I’ve rarely seen a tenured professor be fired but a professor with tenure who is deemed unproductive by whatever anonymous review can certainly be made to wish they didn’t have a job.

Now, I’m not saying that being a university professor is harder than highly dangerous jobs like being an oil rig worker, steel worker, logger, soldier, or deep sea commercial fisher. But I believe that Susan Adams was misguided and irresponsible in using CareerCast as a source in her initial post. Her large audience on this high-profile platform reflects some of the difficultly university faculty face with regard to public perception. I expect more of any Forbes contributor like me or my science writing compatriot, Emily Willingham, but certainly much more from a long-time Forbes staff writer.

I know that I’ve stressed the biomedical side so what do you have to add?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Good point, Kim. To clarify, my initial thoughts were with the proliferation of intermediate-level pseudodeans, not folks like you. Having been a department chair myself and realizing that I had neither the aptitude nor desire to do it more than four years, I understand how difficult your job is, especially in keeping your own research program going. So I’ll admit to a little bit of administrator bashing. My apologies.

What you’ve outlined here is also true in the Geosciences. For those reasons, I’m glad I’m not on the tenure-track. Instead, I suffer with being supported entirely by grant funds procured by other tenured faculty with a little support (and I mean little) from adjunct funds to teach a class each semester.

I choose to be in academics because I enjoy being on the front lines of discovery and to teach the next cohort of scientists. But there are days (sometimes months) where the stress is ridiculous. I have some flexibility in my work hours, but mostly that translates to having permission to spend my weekends working from home.

I know that ‘tenure’ doesn’t mean what it used to. A tenured faculty member can lose their job quickly if the school wants them gone. Being on soft money is even more frightful. Even though I have the same credentials as my tenured colleagues, I live with the endless fear that one day I’ll come to work and will be told that I’m no longer getting paid. Yeah, my position is permanent. The paycheck isn’t.

Because of the nature of my job (I’m primarily a laboratory manager and technician), I don’t have time to write grant proposals to support my own salary. And when I do manage to write one, it goes to funding programs with an approximately 10% funding rate. I have yet to be successful, and I’ve pretty-much given up trying now. Fortunately, it’s not a requirement for me. I just have to keep the lab going and get data to people in a timely fashion.

But if I left, the faculty who support my salary would be in trouble. Even though they’re tenured, they do not have time to take on my duties as well. The mass spectrometer would be shut off and they’d have to contract out their work. Their students would have to travel to get the training they need. It would be very hard to keep their research programs vigorous. Yet, if times got hard, I’d be the first to be let go.

Looking at the ten reasons from the perspective of some disciplines typically presumed not to have laboratories might help generalize this argument. I’m an emeritus prof now, but ran research and technical assistance centers at two state-related institutions, one more teaching oriented and the other stressing research more. ‘

Trained as an economist but working in the fields of community development and urban/regional planning, I think I can reflect a lot of the social science perspective.

We DO have laboratories: they are out there in the real world. Contrary to the claims in Susan Adams’ original article that professors do not have the stress of job travel, many of us do. What we generally don’t have, that corporate travelers do enjoy, is staff or colleagues on the ground at our destinations to arrange our schedules and logistics once we arrive at our destinations.I would submit that we thus have more stress than most workers who travel as part of their jobs.

I have conducted federally funded research that involved work in as many as a dozen US states for a single, albeit multi-year, project. In many instances, research at the community level cannot even be delegated to the equivalent of laboratory assistants since observation in one locale must be compared to observation in another so the same person has to be on site in both places.

Without continuous funding to access those sites, my time was often occupied with staying in touch by phone or electronic means. Before the internet age, that maintenance of contact involved time consuming letters — or starting from scratch the next time out in the same setting.

Run a research center, with or without labs, and you have people depending on you for their funding. That adds stress to daily operations … and it makes the stress that much greater in academic disciplines with smaller scale or numbers of funders or less generous donor organizations. Grants are great, but most of my work was contract research and technical assistance.

Contract work meant that we had to deliver what the clients wanted for their purposes — why they gave us the funds. Then, on our own time and without outside funding, we had to produce the academic products that maintained our reputations — and which were the basis on which we competed for contracts. That’s part of where the 60-80 hour weeks came in — doing the academic writing “on the side”

David – nice article, but as a University Professor, I must respectfully disagree. I apologize that I don’t know your background, but I will make the assumption you have never been an entrepreneur (i.e., someone who has to make something from nothing).

He is trying to make something from nothing as a researcher. That is the point.

Unfortunately the indirect cost associated with university overhead is so extreme his work is similar to launching a new business organization in the most exclusive office building in town with a lease that increases at the whims of the owners.

Agreed, to a point. But a research professor, like any other employer, has obligations to employees and trainees. My HIGHLY productive laboratory manager (several lead-author technical publications in top journals and a patent pending) has a new kid and a mortgage, but she depends on me to obtain the grant funding that pays her salary and benefits. (The funding that pays for her position is private, by the way — not public). That funding is, as the article says, immensely competitive. About one in 18 applications was funded after competitive review, last cycle. We’ve been productive and a bit lucky; ours was one of the successful ones.

So yes, being a research professor is an immense privilege and can be immensely fulfilling. After all, we are — no joke — advancing the frontiers of human knowledge. But the job also carries big responsibilities and, due to the difficulty of obtaining funding, can rest on a razor’s edge. In other words, it’s stressful.

Agree, John. For some reason staff don’t seem to realise that they also can contribute in the search for research grants, particularly if they want to work for a particular prof. I have built, almost lost, and rebuilt businesses in areas which never existed before in the Middle East with no funding, no social support, no family support and with only one thing between me and jail for bounced checks (rents are paid annually in advance..) and that is dogged determination, staff who are in it as much as me, and the ability to create something out of thin air that clients will willingly pay for. Wouldn’t it be great to be a prof with at least 1/4 of my salary covered (phew, there’s the rent), get money in advance just for the sake of an interesting idea which may or may not work, and the ability to lay people off if required (sad, but they are in the same industry and know the drill) but still be able to pick up again another day. That’s almost a dream situation for me!